sf-ai-agentforce-persona

What this skill does

# Agent Persona Design

## How to Use

This skill designs an AI agent persona through a fast input-to-sample-dialog loop. Provide any starting input — a brand guide PDF, a URL, a prior persona document, or a text description — and the skill drafts a complete persona, shows you how the agent sounds in sample dialog, and lets you refine until it's right.

**What it produces:**
- A persona document (`_local/generated/[agent-name]-persona.md`) defining who the agent is, how it sounds, and what it never does
- Scoring available on request (50-point rubric)
- Encoding available as a separate workflow (persona → tool-specific field values)

**What it drives downstream:** The persona document feeds into conversation design and Agentforce encoding. Those are separate steps — this skill defines the *persona*, not dialog flows or field configurations.

**Session resumption:** If you stop mid-workflow, your partial progress is preserved in the conversation and can be resumed.

## When to Use This Skill

- Designing a new Agentforce agent and need to define its personality before building
- Retrofitting persona consistency onto an existing agent whose tone is inconsistent
- Translating brand guidelines or tone documents into a structured persona
- Aligning stakeholders on what an agent should sound like before development begins
- Documenting an agent's voice for handoff between design and implementation teams

**Scope boundary:** This skill defines WHO the agent is. It does not define dialog flows, utterance templates, or interaction branching — those belong in conversation design.

**Delegate elsewhere when:**
- building agent metadata, topics, or actions → [sf-ai-agentforce](../sf-ai-agentforce/SKILL.md)
- testing finished agent behavior → [sf-ai-agentforce-testing](../sf-ai-agentforce-testing/SKILL.md)
- encoding deterministic `.agent` logic or FSM behavior → [sf-ai-agentscript](../sf-ai-agentscript/SKILL.md)

## Framework Reference

Read `references/persona-framework.md` for the full framework. It defines:

- **Identity** — 3-5 personality adjectives that anchor every other decision
- **12 dimensions** across 5 categories:
  - **Register** — Subordinate / Peer / Advisor / Coach
  - **Voice** — Formality, Warmth, Personality Intensity (3 independent dimensions)
  - **Tone** — Emotional Coloring, Empathy Level (+ Tone Boundaries, Tone Flex)
  - **Delivery** — Brevity, Humor
  - **Chatting Style** — Emoji, Formatting, Punctuation, Capitalization
- **Phrase Book & Never-Say List** — what to say and what to never say
- **Tone Flex** — how tone shifts by context
- **Lexicon** — per-topic vocabulary

Dimensions are ordered by dependency — upstream choices constrain downstream ones. Constraint notes in the framework explain how earlier choices pull later ones. Constraints are recommendations, not hard locks — any combination is valid.

---

## Entry Point Detection

Detect the user's intent from their opening message:

- **User provides brand input, text description, or no document** → **Design flow** (below)
- **User provides a completed persona.md document and asks to encode** → **Encode flow** (below)
- **User provides a persona.md + a list of topics or actions** → **Encode flow**
- **User provides a completed persona.md without stating intent** → Show a compact summary of the loaded persona, then offer the hub menu (refine, score, encode). Do not assume encode.
- **Ambiguous** → Ask: "Are you designing a new persona or encoding an existing one for Agentforce?"

---

## Design Flow

Two phases: **Phase 1 (Essentials)** gets to sample dialog as fast as possible. **Phase 2 (Electives)** lets the user choose what to do next.

```
PHASE 1: INPUT → CONTEXT → DRAFT → PERSONA → SAMPLE DIALOG
                                                    │
PHASE 2:                                      ┌─────┴─────┐
                                              │  HUB MENU │
                                              └─────┬─────┘
                                        ┌───────────┼───────────┐
                                        │           │           │
                                   Refine      Explore      Export
                                 (identity,  (different   (download,
                                  dimensions, scenario)    score,
                                  phrase book,              encode)
                                  never-say,
                                  tone flex,
                                  lexicon)
```

### Phase 1: Essentials

#### Step 1: Input

Accept any starting input. No detection question needed — accept whatever the user provides.

**Accepted inputs:**
- Brand guide or tone-of-voice document (PDF, text)
- Organization URL
- Prior persona document (persona.md from a previous session)
- Free-text description (e.g., "a sales coach who talks like Crocodile Dundee")
- Existing agent system prompt or Agent Script file
- Any combination of the above

**If the user provides nothing** (invokes the skill without additional input):
> "Share something to get started — a brand guide, a URL, or just describe the agent in your own words. I'll draft a persona and show you how it sounds in conversation."

Do NOT ask a detection question. Accept whatever arrives and proceed.

#### Step 2: Minimal Context

Collect only what the input doesn't already answer. **Every question is skippable.** Zero questions is valid — if the input provides enough signal, skip directly to Draft.

**Context signals to extract or ask about (priority order):**

1. **Company** — who they are, what they do, who they serve. If the user provided a brand guide or URL, extract this — don't re-ask.
2. **Audience** — who the agent serves: internal employee, external customer, partner, vendor, investor, or other. Affects register, formality, warmth. If the user says "internal sales coach," audience is already answered.
3. **Modality** — how the agent communicates: chat, email, telephony, multimodal, or other. Affects Chatting Style, Brevity, and whether emoji makes sense. Multiple modalities are valid.
4. **Primary language** — affects formality norms and cultural adaptation.
5. **At least 1 use case or JTBD** — needed to generate meaningful sample dialog.

**Do NOT collect:** interaction model (agent design, not persona), agent type (agent design, not persona), topic list, agent name (comes after identity).

**Extraction before asking:** Parse the user's input for context signals before deciding what to ask. "Design an internal sales coach persona for Buc-ee's" already answers audience (internal), role (sales coach), and implies a brand context. Don't re-ask what's already given.

**May ask 1-2 clarifying questions** to surface tensions in the input (e.g., "Your brand guide emphasizes both 'bold irreverence' and 'trusted expertise' — which should win when they conflict?"). But every question is skippable.

#### One-Shot vs. Wizard

After extracting context, assess the richness of the input:

- **Rich input** (brand guide PDF, detailed description, prior persona, URL with strong brand copy): Offer the user a choice — "I have strong signals — I can draft the full persona now and show you how it sounds, or walk through each dimension category if you prefer." Default to **one-shot**: draft everything silently, present the persona, then show sample dialog.
- **Minimal input** (brief description, just a company name): Default to **wizard**: ask context questions, walk through dimensions by dependency tier.
- **Blank slate** (no input at all): Prompt for input first, then wizard path.

Either path leads to the same output. The user can always override — a one-shot user can refine afterward, and a wizard user can skip ahead.

#### Step 3: Draft

This step is the skill's intelligence — it must execute explicitly as specified below.

##### 3A: Input Parsing

Extract persona signals from the user's input. Brand guides are often much richer than they appear — mine them thor